> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?
Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.
+1.
And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.